Women in Landscaping: Kim Lewey

North Carolina native Kim Lewey always wanted to be on a fast track. Willing to do the work, she wanted to know that if she had the ability—and she knew she did—she could move up in the business world.

While attending Wake Forest University, she worked in parks and recreation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Lewey graduated in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education and continued working in parks and recreation. That same year, she married Mike Lewey.

“I wanted to advance my career faster than my employer did, so I left,” she says. Through a family friend, she got a job as a commercial loan clerk at First Citizens Bank in rural Hall, North Carolina. Two years later, Lewey was promoted, and the couple moved to raleigh.

She spent 18 years at the bank and worked her way up to chief credit standards officer, when she felt the need for a change. Lewey was ready to move on.

She began to think about
starting her own business; the entrepreneurial juices were flowing. In
2001, while investigating a business opportunity, her husband Mike came
home to announce that after 16 years as a grounds maintenance supervisor
for a raleigh real estate developer, he had been laid off. The good
news was that he had already been offered another job.

An
idea popped into kim Lewey’s head. This could be an opportunity not
only to start a new business, but one where she and her husband could
work together. She asked him, “Which would you rather do— take this job
or start a business?” To kim, it was a no-brainer. With the contacts
they both had, she was willing to bet on the two of them.

Without her push, Lewey Landscaping and Lawn Care, Inc., probably wouldn’t have happened.

“Mike
is the kind of guy who would have been happy to keep working for
somebody else. I was the one who always wanted my own business.”

Kim
and Mike divide the labor. She handles customer relations, talks to new
and prospective customers, and helps plan the initial work. She also
manages the company finances, including invoices, marketing and
strategizing.

This
allows Mike do what he loves: being out there doing the actual
landscape work and talking to clients. Meanwhile, her focus on the back
office doesn’t keep her from getting her hands dirty once in awhile.

However, Kim Lewey didn’t think she’d end up in the landscape business. But
then, she likes to change things up every now and then.

Lewey Landscaping and Lawn Care is a full-service landscape company, working in the commercial as well as the residential areas.

Their scope of business includes design/build, irrigation installation and repair, as well as low-voltage landscape lighting and maintenance. In addition, they have a pesticide license.

It’s
a true equal partnership for the couple. While kim handles the business
end of the business, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t ever get to work
outdoors. “I’ve gotten a lot of operational experience, especially in
the last two-and-a-half years. When we’re shorthanded, I’ll run a crew
myself. I can pick up pruning shears and spread some mulch, but I’m
probably not going to touch the commercial mower.” Lewey likes the
challenge, saying, “I’m all about learning.”

What
stands out most to Lewey as a woman in a male-dominated field? “At
first, I worried about going to pick up materials. Am I gonna be able to
get out of the dump truck and throw the burlap over it? I don’t know if
this is true for men, but I’ve found that there’s always someone around
who’s willing to help. The vendors are willing to go that extra mile
for me.”

She also
finds that “women are more comfortable talking to women, even if it is
about landscaping. That’s also helped us to grow our business.”

As
a woman, there were some personnel issues. Lewey said that in the
beginning, there was a bit of an issue with the Latino workers fully
accepting her when she got out from behind her desk and into the field.

“I
think it was a cultural thing. They just hadn’t seen a woman doing this
type of work before. Someone would see me pushing a wheelbarrow and run
over and grab it away from me, saying, “No, no, no!” They were used to
seeing me sign the checks, but not doing landscape work right next to them.
These guys have worked for us a long time, and they always joked around
with my husband, but not with me. But in the past year, something
changed, and now they joke around with me, too.”

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It
probably helped that Lewey learned to laugh at herself. “When I drive
our dump truck, I have to move the seat way up to reach the floor.
They’re all much taller than I am, so when they get back in the truck,
their knees are in their chests—so that’s kind of comical. We also laugh
when I make a mistake and shift the gears wrong.

They’ll
look at me, and I say, ‘Oops! Sorry about that!’” Their business
doubled over the past four-and-a-half years, going from two three-man
crews to four. However, with growth and headcount come new challenges.
Lately, Mike and kim have had a hard time maintaining good crew chiefs,
as well as finding drivers with clean enough records behind the wheel to
satisfy their company’s business liability insurance carrier.

With
the paucity of crew chiefs, Kim finds herself out of the office and out
at the jobsite more often than in years past. “I’ll take care of
anything out in the field that’s appropriate,” she says. “Mike will
handle the more complex landscape estimates. He’s the one who knows all
about drainage issues and how many zones there should be for an
irrigation installation. But I can handle anything that requires
measuring square footage—I can run a wheel as well as anybody.”

Lewey
likes being out there with her husband. “It gives us a chance to catch
up, both on our marriage and on the business. This way, we can keep each
other in the loop.”

Each
year brings something new, which suits Lewey just fine. recently, she
has been involved in the design and redesign of her company’s website.
She credits that website with helping to spur growth, but admits that it
took a while to get it right.

“We
didn’t even have a website for the first eight years,” she recalls.
“And the first version we put up wasn’t that good. People weren’t
finding us.”

A 2010
redesign by a new designer, more savvy in SEO (search engine
optimization) brought better page rankings right away. “In the first
three months, we noticed that we were getting a lot
more calls.” Lewey can’t stress enough the importance of a strong web
presence. “In today’s society, having a good website with SEO is vital,
because the under 40 generation does everything by email or Google.
We’re getting more calls than we can handle, so we prefer to grow the
business by quality rather than by quantity.”

She
has also reaped business benefits through networking. For the past five
years, Lewey has been a member of NAWBO, the National Association of
Women Business Owners, Greater raleigh chapter. In the last four as a
member of the Board of Directors (of which she was just named
president-elect).

The
NAWBO has been very helpful, she reports. “you’re meeting with women who
have owned businesses for several years. you’re combining all of their
past experiences, as well as your own, to come up with solutions. you’ll
talk to someone who’s already been there, whether it’s an employee
issue, or whether or not you need to be involved in social media, to
legal matters—we have several members who are lawyers. It’s a real
sisterhood, in a professional sense. Like most organizations, whether
you’re part of a Chamber of Commerce or whatever, you get as much out of
it as you put into it. Plus, it allows people to remember you, to get
to know who you are. That all helps your business.”

For
Lewey, the most enjoyable part of the last eleven years has been
“watching us expand and being able to share and talk about it with each
other. That is, to understand what one another is talking about. In so
many marriages, your spouse doesn’t know what you do all day and doesn’t
care.”

Rounding out
this family affair, their daughter Jordan, a recent college graduate,
has been doing bookkeeping part-time, as well as learning real-world
skills. Lewey plans to use her daughter’s talents as a photographer to
document projects for the website.

Not
one to sit still, Lewey is beginning to think of other avenues of
expanding the family business. Whatever lies ahead for Kim Lewey, it’s
sure to be interesting. “I’m not the type of person who likes to do the
same thing over and over, year in and year out,” she says. “I like
change.” As a successful woman in the landscape business, she’s sure to
get plenty of it.